Aging, cryonics, and the quest for immortality

Share This article

Immortality

So, supposing we figure out cryonics, and people can be preserved and reanimated in the future, are we then well on our way to achieving immortality? Most of us would agree that, in order to truly extend life, we have to extend living, to acquire more heartbeats. In all, our best hope at real life extension is simply to replace whole parts as we go. Rather than repair our heart’s existing pacemaker cells, we could use stem cells to grow an all-new heart, one with brand new pacemakers with a whole life of rhythm still ahead of them.

As far as immortality is concerned, cryonics should be considered more for its potential to preserve our fetal stem cells than the whole body. Leaving aside the impossibility of growing replacement brains, immortality could be a matter of quilting — constructing ourselves out a patchwork of our own organs grown throughout our lives.

The future of immortality will almost certainly see us replacing our parts — or upgrading them?

Rather than hating age, consider having some gratitude toward the developmental process, which sees our hormone levels change in tandem with our physical durability. From a pure fitness perspective, evolution could have given us the life history of a drag racer: total hormonal blowout, getting us to our physical peak as quickly as possible and keeping us there during a self-destructive sprint, before discarding us as blown-out husks when we break down. Instead, our metabolism eases us through the aging process, adjusting everything from sleep patterns to sex drive to better suit us to our current stage in life.

We should also examine the goal of immortality. Vague threats about the ethics of extreme longevity research aren’t likely to hold back progress, but are they entirely unfounded? After all, cancer cells are immortal, they divide infinitely and grow as quickly as they can. Should we envy cancer? Even if we could harness cancer’s immortality without also acquiring its uncontrolled growth, the fact is that death is one way, the ultimate way really, of putting an end to catastrophic cellular errors. The heedless immortality of cancer, inactivating all death signals and simply going for it, always leads to defects and large, random swings in gene frequency. Removing the restrictions that make us age would mean removing many of the same restrictions that keep us alive.

We’ve recently discovered how to combat progeria with a molecule designed to knock out progerin, but progerin is also associated with death in healthy cells. More and more, we’re seeing modern research take serious steps toward immortality, and those steps are not always intentional. As we begin to scratch at the basic workings of life, we’ll also inevitably come up against the mechanics of death. Real life extension science is on the horizon, and we should have a belief in place about how to approach these areas of science, because progress is not going to wait while we grapple with imponderables.

Tagged In

Post a Comment

The requirements for this future should be to 1. If you build immortality, you must deal with a way to make our immortality survive harsh conditions other then earth.

2. Start changing society’s dynamics by making immortality sustainable on our planet for a certain period of time until we can go to other planets.

3. Aggressively retract humanity for urban style lifestyles and build up and reclaim the land for vegitation so we can survive.

4. Have NATO draw up plans for a world peace accord that incorporates immortality and our future with it.

5. If we are to become immortal by definition we are now more then human so we must accept evolutionary changes that may derive from science as necessary to spread throught out the galaxies.

http://www.facebook.com/andrew.s.hodge Andrew Steven Hodge

Whyy do we neccisarrily have to be in human form to be immortal? Why not have a system in place to transfer our conciousness to a new, unconcious body when this one breaks down? That seems to be the more likely scenario looking at how technology is profressing now.

Jamie MacDonald

I think because it would be hard to tell if it was really “you.” Your thoughts and mind are the result of synapses firing off at each other in clusters containing your memories. Replicating the precise structure of your would be damned hard. Carrying all your synaptic pulses across at precisely the right instant to precisely the right points would be so difficult to accomplish I can’t even imagine it.

And then, would “you” wake up in that new body, or a copy of you to the letter? Your consciousness might blink out in the instant they transfer the synaptic profile to the cloned brain, and another duplicate walks away. Everyone else wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, nor would your clone.

But you’d still be dead. Scary thought.

http://www.facebook.com/andrew.s.hodge Andrew Steven Hodge

“Replicating the precise structure of your would be damned hard.”
It was also “damned hard” to break the sound barrier. That being said, it’s obvious that consciousness arises out of the firing of neurons, so me being me really wouldn’t be an issue. It would be comparable to getting brain surgery. After the surgery, those synapses have been altered more than that of my new body, so I think it’s safe to say that I would be conscious and not just an imitation of consciousness. That being said, we need to understand a lot more about the human brain before anything can be definitively proven about this.

Jamie MacDonald

But during the surgery your neurons are still working, pulsing, firing.

Don’t get me wrong, technology can do anything, but it wouldn’t be like going to sleep. Your initial brain would die instantly, and have to be remapped to the new one. In that transient period, would your conciousness die, too?

mori bund

These issues you bring up are the exact reason why I wouldn’t trust “beaming technology” (Star Trek). ^^

jburt56

This may be the only way to outlast modern recessions!!!

jhewitt123

Nice article to cover a broad topic.
@Hodge: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/russian-billionaire-dmitry-itskov-plans-on-becoming-immortal-by-2045 this guy is all ready for that it seems, but I don’t see consciousness transfer happening on principle. You can transfer sensational awareness to a phantom limb, or even a third artificial limb with some training perhaps, but the conscious aspect of it is still in your own brain. Even if somehow you manage complete phantom transfer, when you pull the plug on the original, the phantom goes poof.

http://www.facebook.com/andrew.s.hodge Andrew Steven Hodge

Well, we’ve already proven that there is no soul, so consciousness HAS to arise from synaptic activation patterns in the brain. That being said, this has the implication that those patterns can be replicated in a new body.

GatzLoc

How much research was done here? It’s been known since 1931, when a Nobel prize was awarded for discovering the cause of caner.

It is a lowered blood ph, that arises from more toxins; this causes there to be less oxygen carried by the blood, in turn making cells revert to a more primitive state to survive.

Nature’s first and only rule: survive.

Cancer cells, are a symptom of a toxic body, not a disease by themselves. The body starts to lose its working form, and cell specialization as it starts to break down aka get acidic blood which makes it less oxygen rich.

Other then that, the body replaces itself every 7 years, so keeping toxins out of the body, and keeping the blood clean will extend lifespan. Idk, more then that I haven’t researched immortality because I have no problem with dying.

http://lukeparrish.rationalsites.com Luke Parrish

This article glosses over the distinction between hypothermia and vitrification. Big difference! Hypothermia is gentle cooling, well above 0 degrees Celsius. It is only “cold” relative to the human body temperature. It does cause a cessation of cellular self destruction (autolysis) if done properly, which is why it is used in hospitals, but must be done very gently to avoid triggering these processes even worse.

Vitrification is cooling to the point where a glass (a physically solid yet non-crystalline substance) is formed. In the antifreeze solutions employed in cryonics and other cryobiology, this occurs at roughly 135 degrees below zero Celsius. (By comparison, water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100 degrees.)

Once they reach vitrification temperature, patients are protected from any further damage by two simultaneous effects: extremely high viscosity, and extremely low reaction rates. The question is therefore strictly a matter of the short term damage incurred while getting to that temperature. A cryonics patient could wake up a million years later with no more damage than in the first few hours of cooling.

Cryonics is very different from medical hypothermia as we know it. However, hypothermia gives us a very important hint at what is possible. A hypothermic patient has no brainwave, and yet can recover with the same memories and personality. This is encouraging for cryonics as it supports the theory that all we need to do is maintain the structure well enough to repair — ongoing brain activity is not required to sustain human individuality.

The question of what can be repaired is properly an information sciences and physics question, one which we cannot yet answer confidently with our knowledge of the brain. However, the goal of ongoing cryonics research is to render it a moot point by preserving the brain in pristine condition. This cannot happen without major advances in the science of vitrifying brain cells, an area of science that is small and underfunded (due to lack of interest in cryonics).

Nanotechnology is not simply a MacGuffin that extrapolates infinite progress with no boundaries. Rather it is a prediction of what will happen at some point when chemistry and computer/information science become very tightly integrated. The limits of chemistry still apply, for example energy not coming from nowhere and entropy tending to increase in a closed system. Computer science principles such as certain processes taking exponentially longer to reverse than they take to perform in the first place will also still apply.

These rules and limitations are the ones that prohibit turning a corpse that has been buried or turned to ashes back into a living human. Cryonics is an investigation into whether they apply to dying humans at various low temperature conditions. We won’t know what the answer is until these technologies are much more advanced and closely integrated. If we are lucky, new technologies within our lifetimes will permit good enough vitrification that we don’t need to wonder.

jhambi

Great reply to a nice article. Good stuff all around.

advancedatheist

This article shows some confusions about the cryonics idea. Cryonicists want to use advances in medicine, biotechnology and applied neuroscience to turn death from a permanent off-state into a temporary and reversible off-state. It does have a basis in science, and plenty of nonwealthy people can afford their own cryopreservations through the use of life insurance as the funding mechanism. I’ve had my own arrangements with the Alcor Foundation since 1990, which I guess puts me into the company of hectomillionaires or billionaires like Don Laughlin, Ed Thorp and Robert Miller despite my nonwealthy status.

And some of today’s mainstream neuroscientists have started to see that the cryonicists have advocated an interesting and testable idea all along. Refer to the website of the Brain Preservation Foundation, who has as one its advisers the well-known skeptic of pseudoscience Michael Shermer:

This is also a well-defined scientific question that can be answered today. This question is of great importance, particularly to terminally ill patients wishing to preserve their memories or identities today, for which cryonic preservation of unknown efficacy is presently their only alternative.

We at the Brain Preservation Foundation are dedicated to seeing that these questions are answered in a definitive scientific manner as soon as possible. To do so we have introduced the Brain Preservation Technology Prize – a prize that challenges connectomics researchers and cryonics practitioners alike to demonstrate their best whole brain preservation techniques on an animal whose brain is then sectioned at 1mm intervals and subjected to an independent comprehensive electron microscopic sampling survey looking for damage that would destroy synaptic connectivity.The Prize is designed to uncover the truth about the quality of today’s preservation techniques and to spur research into better techniques.

In other words, we have ways of making progress in improving brain preservation in the here and now with the goal of trying to leave personal identity intact, or at least inferable, without having to invoke speculative future technologies. The right breakthrough could become a game-changer for the survivability of people placed into cryonic suspension.

I also include some background information about cryonics for those unfamiliar with its history, assumptions and arguments:

1. A general but outdated presentation of the idea, mainly of historical interest now:

Microscopic examination showed severe damage in frozen–thawed slices, but generally good to excellent ultrastructural and histological preservation after vitrification. Our results provide the first demonstration that both the viability and the structure of mature organized, complex neural networks can be well preserved by vitrification. These results may assist neuropsychiatric drug evaluation and development and the transplantation of integrated brain regions to correct brain disease or injury.

Mike goes back nearly to the beginnings of cryonics in the late 1960’s, and his blog offers a metaphorical gold mine of information, including references to a lot of scientific papers, about the field and its current but probably surmountable problems. Unfortunately he hasn’t posted on his blog lately.

3. The X PRIZE Foundation has a concept under consideration for a Cryopreservation X PRIZE:

This competition offers two benefits to humanity. First, the ability to increase the number and availability of transplantable organs for patients with organ failure; and second, the ability to move forward the science of human cryopreservation which offers the ability to preserve patients with incurable diseases until a time when medical science has sufficiently progressed to be able to treat the disease.

Day One of the conference ended with Sebastian Seung’s “Connectomics and Cryonics,” followed by a discussion of his talk. Seung began by explaining that connectomics is the application of techniques such as 3D imaging to build high-resolution maps of neural connections. The resulting map is known as the connectome. While working in the field at MIT, Seung met Alcor member and Harvard neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth. When talking with Hayworth one day, Seung realized the implications of connectomics for cryonics and included some of his thoughts on the subject in his book Connectome, which elicited varied reactions.

Starting with the hypothesis that “you are your connectome” (reminiscent of “The Astonishing Hypothesis” of Francis Crick), Seung presented evidence from neuroscience that chemopreservation successfully preserves brain structure as evidenced by reconstructions using serial electron micrographs (EM). He then asked whether memories can be “read” from such connectomes and discussed what kinds of structural information might be important to answering such questions. Ultimately, he concluded that connectivity, including the shapes of neurons and locations of synapses, is what must be preserved in order to construct the identity contained within.

To that end, Seung and Hayworth announced the Technology Prize to be awarded by the Brain Preservation Foundation to the first individual or team to demonstrate a technique capable of preserving a human brain for long-term storage with high fidelity. The current contenders for the first stage of the prize have employed both chemo- and cryopreservation methods, but the required imaging and analyses of these samples has not yet been completed. Seung’s presentation was followed by a relatively long discussion with the audience, which quickly turned into a debate about the merits of chemopreservation and cryopreservation. Topics discussed included the long-term stability of chemopreserved brains and whether the Technology Prize is neutral between both approaches.

shawnirwin

The woolly mammoth they found in Russia just recently was in temperatures well below freezing, (-7 to -10ºC) yet the blood was intact . . . . suggesting that they had something in their blood (cryoprotective properties) which thwarted freezing. It will be interesting to see what they come up with after further research on this.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.